1. Field
The present invention relates generally to the transmission of information over a distribution network, and more specifically to optimizing receiver timing synchronization.
2. Background
Data networks, such as wireless communication networks, must trade off between services customized for a single terminal and services provided to a large number of terminals. For example, the distribution of multimedia content to a large number of resource limited portable devices (subscribers) is a complicated problem. Therefore, it is very important for network administrators, content retailers, and service providers to have a way to distribute content and/or other network services in a fast and efficient manner and in such a way as to increase receiver performance, bandwidth utilization, and power efficiency.
In current content delivery/media distribution systems, wide area and local area real-time and non real-time services are packed into a transmission frame and delivered to devices on a network. For example, a communication network may utilize Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to provide communications between a network server and one or more portable devices. Using this technology, a transmission frame can be generated that has data slots packed with services to be delivered over a distribution network as a transmitted waveform.
Typically, a transmitter operates to transmit the transmission frames over a transmission channel to devices in communication with the network. The transmission channels often experience conditions that make it difficult for receiving devices to recover the transmitted data because traditionally determined fixed timing synchronization parameters do not dynamically accommodate changing channel conditions. For example, it is possible that timing synchronization is suboptimal or that channel conditions will change rapidly. In both instances, the result may be inaccurate OFDM symbol timing at the receiver that prevents the receiver from accurately decoding the transmitted data.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system that operates to provide adjustable timing synchronization, which dynamically adapts itself to prevailing channel conditions thereby avoiding the problems associated with suboptimal timing synchronization parameters and fast changing channel conditions in both wide and local area channels.